


Insight

by Drenagon



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Book/Movie 2: Catching Fire, Complete, Gen, Quarter Quell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-03
Updated: 2016-06-03
Packaged: 2018-07-12 01:36:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7079257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drenagon/pseuds/Drenagon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A quiet moment during the Quarter Quell leads to a conversation Peeta never expected to have.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Insight

Insight

‘Hey,’ Peeta says into the quiet. He keeps his voice low, reluctant to disturb any of the victors who have finally found sleep. He’s on watch, but with most of the danger on such a strict timetable he’s had chance to keep an eye on the sleepers as well.

And the one who hasn’t found sleep. The more he’s watched Wiress, the more concerned he’s become.

No one should be shivering in this heat.

At first he’d worried it might be a fever. Even though Beetee was the one who’d been stabbed, he’d thought perhaps Wiress had picked up a scratch somewhere and it was getting infected, though Katniss had spotted nothing when she’d cleaned Wiress up. He’d watched quietly, trying to decide what to do, when suddenly it struck him.

Wiress’s Games, the 44th if Peeta’s remembering rightly, had been held in a frozen landscape. Snow, ice, very little shelter and making a fire had been so dangerous most of the tributes hadn’t dared. The ones who had hadn’t lasted very long. Wiress had won by creating a heat source that didn’t need flames to keep her warm, and by setting a couple of traps for the hardier tributes. She’d outlasted them all.

She’s also never left, Peeta thinks. Not in her head. Not if she’s shivering just from memories in the middle of this tropical jungle.

But did any of them ever leave their arenas, really? Peeta suspects not. He certainly hasn’t, so far, though he keeps trying. Keeps trying to paint it out of him.

‘Wiress, hey,’ he calls again, when he doesn’t get a response. She looks up at him this time, it’s still light enough for them to see each other easily, and Peeta smiles in a way that usually calms people. ‘You cold?’ he asks gently. She nods, jerky like most of her movements are.

‘Well that’s no good,’ he tells her. ‘Here, come sit with me, maybe it’ll warm you up.’

Wiress pauses for a moment, uncertain. Peeta wonders what’s going through her head right now. Is she suspicious of any form of kindness offered in this place, as Katniss is? Peeta knows his District partner didn’t trust a single gesture he made or word he uttered between their first Reaping and the moment she realised he’d saved her from Cato. Trust just wasn’t in Katniss’ nature, not trust without proof. Wiress hadn’t struck him as that cynical, but perhaps he was wrong.

Then she pushes herself to her feet and picks her way carefully over to him, and he decides that he wasn’t wrong after all.

Either that or she’s laying a very cunning trap and has a knife somewhere that she’s going to stab him with. It’s possible, people have done worse in an arena, but he’s already judged it unlikely. That’s more Johanna’s style than Wiress’s.

Wiress drops down close by Peeta, but a little too far away for his body-heat to do her any real good. Not that he thinks for a moment her shivering is due to physical cold. He’s just hoping that the two of them can use her body to stop her mind tricking her, the way Peeta uses the feel of Katniss’ heartbeat to force his mind to recognise that she didn’t die, that’s she’s right there with him.

‘Here,’ he says again, holding his arm out. ‘I’ve got plenty of heat to share. Although I’ll admit I’m not the sweetest-smelling thing in the jungle. I need one of those weird showers in the Capitol.’ Wiress is kind enough to smile at the weak joke, and after a moment of hesitation she tucks herself under his arm. Peeta rubs his hand up and down the exposed part of her forearm, trying to give her the image of being warmed up to counteract whatever she sees in her head.

‘You’re like Haymitch, huh?’ he asks softly after a moment. ‘He’s always cold too. In the winter I had to go over three times a day to make sure the fires stayed lit. Otherwise he’d wake up shivering and complaining he was going to get pneumonia.’ He’s deliberately pretending not to have made a connection to Wiress’ Games. None of them like having their weaknesses out in the open. It’s just too dangerous, even when they aren’t trapped in a slaughterhouse being viewed live by millions of people.

Wiress is looking up at Peeta curiously, but still with a little smile on her face. Once they’d figured out the clock puzzle – or rather, once Katniss had figured out the Wiress puzzle, because this lady had been miles ahead of the rest of them, no matter what names Johanna has for her – Wiress had calmed down and seemed fairly happy for someone in their situation.

Peeta has no idea how he’s going to kill this woman, even for Katniss’ sake. He doesn’t know how he’ll manage to hurt any of them.

‘Katniss kept telling me off, though,’ Peeta tells her, continuing his earlier thought. ‘She said if Haymitch got near one of the fires and went up in flames because of all the liquor in him then it’d all be my fault.’

Wiress laughs quietly now, shaking her head a little, and it’s Peeta’s turn to smile. The look in her eyes is fond, and it’s that that prompts his next question.

‘Do you know him well?’ he asks Wiress. ‘Haymitch, I mean.’

‘Yes,’ Wiress answers, speaking to him properly for the first time since they met a few days ago in training. ‘He was five…’, she pauses, cocking her head to the side, then shakes it sharply, ‘no, six, years….’ Then she trails off again.

‘Six years behind you?’ Peeta queries, and she nods just as sharply.

‘You know almost all of them, then,’ Peeta says. Wiress’s eyes, tired and sad now, are her agreement.

‘Beetee was mine,’ she tells him, and Peeta knows she means her mentor. ‘Mags helped him look after me, after her tribute died and then again after… after,’ the second after is so final it must mean following the games. The time when they’re all so messed up they can hardly tell up from down. ‘Finnick was sweet,’ Wiress continues. ‘Like a little one,’ she holds her hand a foot or so off the ground to indicate a very young child, ‘into everything and smiling so brightly you couldn’t be mad.’

‘And Johanna?’ Peeta asks, not able to help himself. He can’t help his laughter, either, when Wiress rolls her eyes and makes a gesture that’s clearly meant to indicate craziness. Wiress isn’t as far gone as Johanna thinks she is, that’s the conclusion Peeta’s rapidly coming too. He wonders if Johanna realises that she and Wiress play the same game, let people underestimate them until it suits them to stop. Not that he thinks Wiress is all there - her reaction after the blood rain shows there’s some pretty serious damage to her sanity – but how is that different to any of them? Johanna seems fairly unhinged as well, in Peeta’s far-from-expert opinion.

It occurs to him, as he thinks about what Wiress has just told him, that here is his opportunity to ask a question he’s been clamping down on since well before the Quarter Quell Reaping. Back when he thought it would be he and Katniss mentoring another pair of children for this hopeless, agonising experience. The question he could never bear to ask Haymitch. Not when he thought of all those tributes – 46 tributes, a figure that just seems grotesque if he considers it for more than a moment – who had come before him. All those for whom Haymitch had been the only mentor, all those that Haymitch had, with a sickening inevitability, lost to arena after arena.

‘Wiress, what’s it like to mentor someone?’

For a moment, the silence makes Peeta fear he’s offended her, pressed too hard on one of the many unhealed bruises they try to hide. When he looks down, though, he sees that Wiress’s face is thoughtful, not closed off or angry.

‘Like a coal face,’ Wiress responds when she’s finished thinking. Peeta’s face must show his confusion, because she pats his chest with her hand and speaks again.

‘You’ve seen them?’ she asks him gently. Peeta nods. All District 12 children go on the same school visits every year. ‘All of this,’ Wiress explains, tapping where his heart beats, ‘is the coal. Lots and lots and lots of bits. Some tiny, some bigger. Some…,’ and she stretches her arms out wide, indicating a huge space. ‘Each bit is a boy, or a girl. And the Capitol just….’ Peeta looks down, wondering if she’s going to trail off again, but Wiress hasn’t stopped. She’s miming, hands clenched together as if on a handle and she’s bringing them forward and down, over and over. A pick, chipping away at the coal face.

The Capitol, chipping the tributes out of their mentors’ hearts, year after year.

‘Some are tiny,’ Wiress says again. ‘Some bigger. Like Finnick, for Mags.’

‘For you?’ Peeta questions, then wishes instantly that he hadn’t. What does he think he’s doing? Chipping away at this woman’s pain himself, just to satisfy his curiosity. Wiress pats his chest again, comfortingly.

‘Easier,’ she answers in a reassuring tone. ‘Beetee does more. They don’t understand….’ This time Wiress does trail off, but Peeta thinks he knows what she means. Enough to hazard a guess, at least.

‘They don’t see what you see,’ he suggests. ‘They try, maybe. They look at the same things, but it just doesn’t mean the same to them as it does to you. Like the rest of us and the clock?’

Wiress’s nod is more than sad, almost heartbroken, but also resigned.

‘Tick tock,’ she utters quietly, meeting Peeta’s eyes. He finds himself nodding. Wiress tilts her head to one side again in an unspoken question.

‘I paint things,’ he tells her, not wanting to assume that she’s watched any of the rubbish about him and Katniss that the Capitol have been bombarding people with. ‘I try to, anyway. Sometimes I think I have them down exactly as they were; the people, or the events. The things I remember. But it doesn’t matter how careful I am, how hard I try. It never looks the same to other people as it does to me. They never see the same thing. Their mockingjay is singing….’ Now it’s Peeta’s turn to trail off, but it doesn’t matter. Because this woman, this supposedly broken woman, is exactly what Beetee says she is. A genius, yes. More than that, intuitive.

‘Your mockingjay just wants to fly away,’ she says, and Peeta feels a strange, impossible certainty that she is thinking of the same painting he is. That Wiress has looked at his attempt and, for once, someone has seen what he was trying to show them.

Peeta closes his eyes for just a second, not sure if he’s trying to capture this moment, this understanding, in his memory, or blot it from his mind forever.

How is he ever going to be able to kill these people?


End file.
